Do any type of review of a game in the series Call of Duty It may seem like a very difficult task, as the franchise’s legion of fans is quite fierce in defending any criticism you may make of the title in question. The arguments are several. Maybe you’re not a great player, you didn’t understand the nuances of sliding around the scene in multiplayer games, or you didn’t know how to appreciate the story created for the game. Everything is a reason to justify the negative points highlighted.
However, even the franchise’s biggest fans have begun to realize that the annual releases of CoD They greatly harm the quality of games, reaching the point where games become completely unnecessary. This is the case with the new Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3.
Weak single player, unremarkable multiplayer
I played the first Call of Duty in 2007. I finally had a decent computer to run the game on and I loved everything about it. Since then, whenever possible, I was there playing the new games in the franchise. It’s something that’s a bit different from the type of game I normally like, but it still has that appeal for me.
A trilogy Modern Warfare original is one of my favorites and I confess to having enjoyed it when the series increasingly took a path that looked to the future, with titles like Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. Even Infinite Warfareits sequel that received more blows from fans than it really deserved, I found it interesting.
These particular titles appealed to me especially because the single player campaign Call of Duty That’s what always impressed me. Although I recognize that many buy these games for their multiplayer mode, CoD For me, it was always that Hollywood movie in the form of a game, with soldiers helping each other, camaraderie, explosions, gunfire and you in the middle of the action.
The remake of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare It easily became one of my favorites, one of the games in the franchise in which I had both fun with the story mode and the multiplayer. Only Modern Warfare 3 It is not even a shadow of what its predecessors were.
Or single player mode MW3 manages to commit the biggest sin of the franchise: being extremely boring. The story is poorly handled, it tries to recreate moments that worked very well in the past, but now seem like a dull copy, it features tedious missions and what it tries to introduce that is new, doesn’t work.
The mode attempts to include “open world” missions, where you have freedom to approach your objectives. In theory this is great, but it works as a Warzone lite, since the objectives are practically the same as the free game and you are left waiting for enemies with a somewhat dumb AI that runs towards your shots. If I wanted that, I could just play Warzone.
Nothing there works as well as it should and it looks like something done in a hurry to be launched within the deadline stipulated by management. Which makes a lot of sense, given that this is what supposedly happened, with Sledgehammer Games having half the normal time to produce a Call of Duty normal to deliver the game. The case becomes more serious when, according to Bloomberg, developers believed they were working on an expansion of Modern Warfare 2, until they discovered that it was actually a new game. All of this is more than evident when you play.
The Curse of the Annual Release
For years, developers have worked with franchises with new games being released every year. Ubisoft has done this a lot with its Assassin’s Creed e Far Cryreaching the point that the public no longer accepted the same game with a different skin and the company decided to hold things back a little.
Sports games are acceptable, although often an expansion and updates would work much better for players. Call of Duty It is an extremely important franchise for Activision Blizzard and, now, for Microsoft, so much so that it was at the center of the entire fight to acquire the company.
It is expected that with Microsoft taking over Activision Blizzard once and for all, the annual releases of Call of Duty end and, once again, the franchise can have time to breathe and new games really make a difference for players. Microsoft can make tons of money from Warzonewhile allowing other teams time to develop games.
Will happen? We cannot be sure, as the company can continue with this industrial pace to make its purchase worthwhile and continue launching a Call of Duty every year. In early 2022, there were rumors that the company would focus on maintaining Warzone always updated, while giving other teams more time to work on games, leaving aside the annual release calendar.
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This didn’t last a semester, as Modern Warfare 2 It hit stores in November 2022 and, in August 2023, its sequel was announced.
In the end, there is no way to defend CoD Modern Warfare 3. Is it impossible to have fun with him? No, especially if you only play multiplayer. It features good maps and its gameplay is as good as the previous game, not to mention almost identical.
In the year in which Call of Duty turns 20 years old, MW3 becomes emblematic of the franchise for representing exactly what it has become: a dull copy of the glories of the past.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is available for PC, Xbox Series S and X, Xbox One, PS4 and PlayStation 5.